Violaine Mitchell is the Director of the Immunization Program Strategy Team (PST). The Immunization PST was launched in July 2022 and partners with countries, global, regional, and country public private sector organizations, including civil society, to make sure that vaccines and immunization are effectively prioritized and delivered. Violaine is also the foundation’s representative to the Gavi Board.
Prior this role she was the Director of the Health Funds and Partnerships Team within the Global Delivery Program overseeing the foundation’s engagement in Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance and The Global Financing Facility as well as the foundation engagement in routine immunization strengthening in high-risk polio geographies.
Before joining the foundation in 2010, she worked as the coordinator of the GAVI Financing Task Force under contract to the World Bank, where she was responsible for coordinating the vaccine alliance’s early work on national financial sustainability planning and global innovative financing. Earlier, she worked at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, where she was the study director for a study on the Children’s Vaccine Initiative and assistant study director for the IOM Study on Malaria Prevention and Control.
Violaine grew up in Kenya and spent a number of years working on integrated community development projects, including three years working with traditional refuse collectors in Cairo, Egypt, on child health, animal health and production, and income generation projects funded by Catholic Relief Services, Oxfam, and UNICEF, among others.
She has a B.A. in development studies from Brown University and an M.Sc. in tropical public health from the Harvard School of Public Health. Along with her partner, Vio runs a mixed farm in British Columbia, Canada.
